And so Germany won the World Cup, once again reaffirming their status as leviathans of football. If there’s an international tournament about, you can be fairly sure that the Germans will be there in the closing stages, battling it out for medals and glory. Four times now they have won the greatest tournament of them all, not to mention the four finals and five semi-finals. For the German football team, life is one long lap of honour, one immense open-top bus parade.

Which is a bit of a shame for semi-professional football-and-wine analogists, because for all the garlands won by their footballers, if you were to fill a stadium with enthusiastic amateur wine-drinkers from across the world and bring out a succession of wines grouped by nationality – and to be fair I can imagine no reason why anyone would do this, but I’m speaking hypothetically here – Germany’s would get booed off.

Some national football teams fit their homeland’s winegrowing profiles quite well. Chile, for example, were extremely popular at the World Cup, with a squad short on expensive stars that overdelivered. Italy assumed rivals would crumble in the face of their inevitable superiority but despite the presence of some extremely classy players they received a rude awakening. England believed they had produced some effervescent, sparkly players good enough to rival the best in Europe, but hadn’t.

In their inarguable excellence the German team unified opinion in a way that their wines never do. I celebrated their success with a bottle of Von Winning 2012, a just a little bit off-dry riesling from the Pfalz, which I found delicious in a limey, green-appley, superlatively summery way; Mrs CF took a single sip and then actually threatened me with physical violence if I ever stain her glass with German wines again (she then proceeded to drink the rest of her glass and a couple more, grumbling all the while).

The biggest club in German football is Bayern Munich, who hoover up domestic silverware with such perpetual hunger and remorseless drive that even their national side would be shamed by their relative lack of ambition and achievement. Nearly everyone likes Bayern Munich, and even those who don’t can’t help but acknowledge their excellence. But the nerdy football folk of this world, the people for whom the obvious is never quite enough, prefer the relatively minor but enormously cooler St Pauli, or perhaps Union Berlin. German wine is not Bayern Munich. German wine is St Pauli.

As Jancis Robinson recently wrote, it’s difficult to find anyone who works in wine who does not love riesling. Ask 100 wine professionals to name their favourite white grape and 90 of them will without thinking give you the same answer. Ask the same question on the UK high street and you’d probably get more people saying picpoul.

With my football-loving hat on, I’ve got to say Germany are so successful it’s annoying. And with my wine-loving hat on (I don’t actually have a wine-loving hat) Germany is so unsuccessful it’s frustrating. I can only imagine how infuriating it must be to those trying to flog their wines to the unappreciative British public. But if they do need to cheer themselves up, there’ll probably be an open-top bus driving past sometime soon.

Not long ago the worlds of sport and wine explored totally different orbits. Footballers drank a fair amount, to be sure, but in Britain at least their beverage of choice came in pint glasses. Cyclists and long-distance runners once used brandy to keep them going, but then moved away from alcohol altogether and discovered cleverer stuff that came in syringes and intravenous drips. Now, though, you can’t keep them apart. Manchester United force Wayne Rooney to exhibit his ludicrous ham-acting skills in Casillero del Diablo adverts; the ongoing football World Cup has a partnership with Taittinger; and the Ryder Cup will be toasted with a special bottling of Mouton Cadet, “available from the month of June in some of the best golf courses and fine wine shops around the world”. And then there’s Wimbledon, the demure, advertising-averse London-based tennis jamboree, which is in the fourth year of a partnership with Jacob’s Creek.

So here’s a competition for you – try to think of a wine-related tennis player, and if it makes me chuckle I’ll send you a bottle of Jacob’s Creek in a special commemorative collectable cut-out-and-keep Wimbledon jacket, exceedingly similar to the one pictured left. Or, more accurately, Jacob’s Creek will send it to you. Entries welcome either by email, by adding a comment to this post, or to @TheCellarFella on Twitter. And here are a few of my own:

Bjorn Borgogne

John Mâconroe

Lindsay Vintageport

Chi-anti Murray River

Riojer Federer

Chateauneuf du Pat Rafter

Johan Jacobs Kriek*

* You should know who Johan Kriek is – he won two Australian Open titles in the 1980s, and got to the semi-finals in France and the US. Though to be fair he was only good for a couple of years. And I had to check on Wikipedia to make sure I hadn’t just made him up.

So go on, thinking caps on. You can’t do any worse than me…

I like words. Good ones, or even standard ones chosen particularly craftily and then put in the right order, bring me pleasure. But I’m not crazily demanding: I’m perfectly happy to put up with a very ordinary choice of words, so long as they convey a meaning precisely and succinctly. But equally the wrong choice of words – I’m talking of the “serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer” ilk here – can make me really quite annoyed.

In the latest issue of Decanter, the nation’s premier wine magazine, someone has used the phrase “gustatory perception”. There is something about the phrase “gustatory perception” that, perhaps fittingly, sticks in my throat. In my opinion the phrase “gustatory perception” is acceptable only when used either in a scientific journal or with enormous quantities of irony, and probably best used ironically in a scientific journal. In this case, however, the phrase “gustatory perception” has been used without irony in a consumer magazine by a writer who, as a direct result of producing the phrase “gustatory perception”, was rewarded with real money.

“Colour turns out to be as contrary and debatable as anything else in wine,” he writes, “making a big impact on expectations, winemaking and, perhaps most significantly, the gustatory perception of the drinker.”

He might have ended that sentence with the simple phrase “what the drinker tastes”, but he chose not to. But I don’t blame the writer, I blame the people at Decanter, for creating a magazine in which the non-ironic use of the phrase “gustatory perception” is acceptable. A magazine that doesn’t care whether words are used in the kind of combinations that bring pleasure.

It was the final straw. I’ve put up with the endless panel tastings of wines I’ll never even consider buying, the profiles of wineries everyone already knows about, and the hideous awards issue – an annual doorstop-sized exercise in reader-alienating industry back-slapping – but this was too much. I stuffed the magazine back in my bag unfinished and spent the rest of my bus journey gazing sniffily out of the window. The following day I got a letter from the magazine’s publishers telling me that my subscription was up for renewal.

The only reason I’ve put up with Decanter for so long is that there really isn’t anything else. In the world of wine publishing there’s no equivalent of the old NME-or-Melody-Maker newsagent-based reading wars. In the world of wine publishing there’s not even a reading skirmish. There’s barely a reading evil glare. There’s one wine magazine that you sometimes see in shops that sell magazines, and that’s your lot.

There are a couple of others that you sometimes see in high-falutin’ bottle shops: the World of Fine Wine, whose very name conjures up images of the kind of people who like to let the phrase “gustatory perception” swirl around their mouths like it was the finest Montrachet. The main problem with WoFW is that it costs £89 a year (print only) which, given that it’s a quarterly, amounts to £22.25 an issue, which is bad value however good the writing is.

Then there’s Noble Rot. At £32 a year (in the UK) it’s £8 an issue, which is quite a lot if you compare it to standard consumer magazines, but makes it very much the Jacob’s Creek to WoFW’s Chateauneuf. The good thing about Noble Rot is that it concentrates not on telling readers how wine should taste and whether it’s better or worse than other wines that taste almost exactly the same, but on stories, many of them very well told, and people, many of them largely unknown. The bad thing about Noble Rot is a lack of storytellers: the guys behind the magazine are called Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew, and of the 29 articles in the latest issue they wrote or co-wrote 15 of them, as well as taking most of the photographs. Their omnipresence gives a home-made, rough-and-ready fanzine feel to a magazine that otherwise looks and feels pretty professional, but they have ability to match their enthusiasm.

I’m new to Noble Rot, and have yet to become infuriated by any repeated faults it may have. It’s certainly not perfect, and there are some articles in this issue that seem useful primarily as space-fillers. But it is by some margin the best periodically-published collection of largely wine-focused words at a vaguely acceptable price in the land, a small boast but a notable one. Decanter have had their time; this subscriber is going elsewhere.

I’ve left restaurants hungry before. I’ve left restaurants happy, angry, full, thirsty, drunk and sleepy. But I can’t remember a restaurant, despite delivering acceptable food and acceptable service, making me feel insulted. Polpo did, and its owner has repeatedly compounded it by being unforgivably sanctimonious in print and on screen, preaching about how seriously he takes the customer’s sense of well-being while all the while treating them with disdain.

By the end I sat in his flagship restaurant, packed with punters, slack-jawed with astonishment at the conjuring trick this man has pulled off. If the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick a restaurateur ever pulled was convincing the world that this place is deserving of any more than immediate receivership. It’s no wonder that Russell Norman has been mentoring aspiring restaurant-owners on his own television series – the man has a magic touch. He’s a genius, of sorts. An evil, swivel-chaired, cat-stroking genius. Being taught how to run a restaurant by Russell Norman is like taking lessons in how to use a light sabre from Emperor Palpatine himself. He might convert you to the dark side, but damn you’ll have some skills.

Polpo is a Soho-based bàcaro – “a Venetian word to describe a humble restaurant serving simple food and good, young local wines” – that launched to great acclaim in 2010 and has been packed ever since.

“It’s a sort of Italian tapas bar that looks as if it’s been cleverly transported from Greenwich Village,” AA Gil wrote in the Sunday Times. “I love eating in New York, and I particularly like this ambience: relaxed and friendly, but also funny and welcoming. The lighting flatters, and the menu is your table mat. The place was humming with happy diners, and if you are young and want a cheap, good, fun date restaurant, there really isn’t a better one in London.”

“It’s a jolly nice place,” reckoned Giles Coren in the Times.  “Max and I stood around for maybe 40 minutes by the bar, drinking a bit more than one would normally want to on an empty stomach and only a couple of times being shoulder-slammed by a bustling waitress and spilling our drinks on our shoes. Then suddenly we were at a lovely table, deep in the warm hustle of the place. From the warmth and comfort of the table, you first of all forget your long wait, and then begin to look back on it fondly as having been the very best of times, much as a married man looks back fondly on single days which were, in truth, full of nothing but the fear that they would never end.”

Observer Food Monthly made it their restaurant of the year in 2013. “A great menu of gutsy food at a price which, by London standards, didn’t make your eyes water, delivered by staff who seemed more interested in you than the angle of the cutlery on the table. It became the place for a greaseless fritto misto, for duck ragus, for robust, bitter salads, impeccable flatbreads, and earthy wines poured into tumblers like they were shots of Jim Beam. It’s the kind of effortless cool that takes serious work.”

It’s a no-reservations restaurant. I’m not going to criticise it for that, however deserving – you know the deal when you turn up. But unlike most other no-reservation restaurants, in between turning up to put your name on the list and getting a table you’re not allowed out of the building. So you’re forced into a small subterranean cocktail bar/holding pen which, depending on the precise time of your arrival, will either be horribly packed or about to be horribly packed. Eventually you’re snagged on a metaphorical shepherd’s hook and led upstairs to your table. This is all done to make life convenient for the restaurateur at the customer’s expense, but it’s a deal I’d make so long as it stopped when I was seated. It doesn’t.

With the help of our waitress we ordered half a dozen things that made some kind of sense, but then they arrive in any order the kitchen desires. So while some meatballs might have got on fine with a very mildly glorified cauliflower cheese, they didn’t have much to say to the fritto misto they arrived with, while the cauliflower was served up, ludicrously, alongside a salmon tartare. Wine is served in humble beakers, which I don’t object to in principle so long as it is humble wine, but instead they sell wine whose qualities will be lost in this environment – the list goes up to £67 a bottle. Our table was by the gangway, so our empty plates were whisked away immediately by cheerful staff. The table beside ours had to stack theirs up when they were finished.

The one pleasant surprise was that we weren’t then told to wash up, and that we had to pay for that as well. This is a restaurant that does nothing exceptionally except take your money and usher you out the door, to make way for whichever poor souls are at that moment desperately entombed in the holding pen. Making people queue for this for five years and counting is an achievement worthy of every award Norman has ever been given, but I for one won’t be darkening these doors again.

If you want small plates in central London, every restaurant in the Salt Yard group does more interesting food, lets you book a table, does a better job with wine and is infinitely preferable in every possible way. There’s Terroirs and its siblings. There is, in other words, choice, and plenty of it. Enough to leave Polpo very well alone.

ps Sorry about the not posting for a month and a half business. I’ve been in a funk.

Exactly 10 years ago to the week I left home to spend a month in New Zealand, and a few days in Australia. Looking back, it was a unique and happy time: I was young(er), I was single, I had been working for a few years and could afford to turn dream holidays into reality (so long as the reality wasn’t too luxurious). Perhaps I spent a little too much time on buses and in youth hostels, but still the trip exceeded all expectations, and since the moment my heavily Lord of the Rings-themed plane took off from Queenstown airport I have yearned to return. But times change: within six months I was no longer single, a couple of years after that I was married, another year and I was a parent. A decade ago a dream holiday involved a month spent sheltering from the worst extremes of the northern hemisphere winter on the other side of the world, sea-kayaking with dolphins, spotting whales and setting off carefree on multi-day walks; n0w it’s a night away in Hampshire.

And so it was that the closest I was ever going to get to repeating my great journey a decade on was to snatch a couple of hours at the annual Wines of New Zealand tasting in central London, in between dropping the kids off at school and picking them up again.

Over the same decade life has changed just as much in the New Zealand wine industry as it has chez Cellar Fella. Between 2004 and 2013 exports to Australia rose in quantity by nearly nine times (8.8 to be precise); to the USA by six times; and to the UK by three and a half times. In 2004 they sold NZ$302.6m worth of wine around the world; in 2013 it was NZ$1.211bn, almost precisely four times as much. In the same time the number of wineries rose from 463 to 698, the area under vine from 18,112 hectares to 35,733 and total production from 119.2 million litres to 248.4 million (all the numbers come from here). My only fear about returning to New Zealand is that the beautiful wilderness that entranced me in 2004 will all have been ripped up and turned into vineyard.

There are wines that clearly evoke a place, and others that don’t so much. Sometimes the secrets lie inside the liquid itself, which might contain clues about where it was made, and how; on other occasions it’s all in the drinker’s head. Perhaps they drank this wine once on a particularly memorable occasion, or perhaps they visited the area it was made, or even the winery itself. To many, for example, a glass of Man O’War chardonnay is nothing but another fairly impressive white wine. To anyone who’s been to Waiheke, the gorgeous island where they’re based, it will evoke memories of the short ferry ride from Auckland (that’s it, below) and an indecent number of spectacular viewpoints (there’s one up top, featuring what I do believe is a distant vineyard). I’ve often found Kiwi wines particularly evocative of a certain spirit that has, in truth, nothing much to do with the wines, and everything to do with my memories of their homeland.

My trip to the tasting, like my visit to New Zealand all those years ago, was a great deal briefer than I really needed to have a proper look around. So I chose my targets: no sauvignon blanc passed my lips, and almost no pinot noir, as I instead targeted chardonnay, syrah and a few Bordeaux blends. Man O’War were represented, with their top wines – which carry names like Valhalla, Ironclad and Dreadnought, all of which sound best when said in the aggressive, plummy tones of Blackadder Goes Forth’s Lord Melchett – reliably excellent for a shade over £20 (more like a shade under £30, in some cases). Craggy Range remain consistently superb as well, with the Gimblett Gravels Syrah a reliable bet also for £20, and their top-of-the-range syrah, Le Sol an absolute stunner for about twice that.

I particularly enjoyed the four Pyramid Valley wines, which is a shame as they’re quite pricey. They had two chardonnays and a couple of pinots, and with both grapes one of the pair stood out: the Lion’s Tooth chardonnay 2011 outshone the Field of Fire and the slightly cloudy and idiosyncratic Angel Flower pinot noir 2009 outperformed the Earth Smoke from 2010.

The problem with New Zealand is that, other than the oceans of characterless sauvignon blanc, it’s very hard to get a standout wine in the £8-£14 range where I do the vast majority of my wine shopping. They do have a couple of reliable brands who operate at that level, particularly Villa Maria and Esk Valley (owned by Villa Maria), but anything with individuality and personality comes at a cost. It’s not just the amount of wine coming out of New Zealand that’s been rising inexorably, but the price of it as well: that Craggy Range Le Sol cost £21 seven years ago, £29 in January 2010, £37 in January 2011 and £45 in January 2013 (and that’s if you’re lucky – at Roberson right now a single bottle will set you back £63.95). A few years ago I bought a case of their top Bordeaux blend, Sophia; now it’s out of my range. If the aim is to target two extremes of the wine-buying scale – those seeking a reasonably cheap party quaffer at one end, and those willing to spend £25 or considerably more in search of something sensational at the other – it leaves those of us who inhabit the space in between a little left out.

In short, I might have to find another way of evoking my memories. Still, I’ve always got my photos.

Most wine is made in giant wine-making-factories and sold in giant stuff-selling factories, widely known as supermarkets. This is an inevitability and a necessity: there are simply too many people with too little time and too much thirst for any alternative method to work. People with slightly more time and perhaps slightly more money can choose slightly less industrialised retail environments in which to splash their wino-cash. But in some make-believe dream world it is possible, even in cold, rainy locations many miles from interesting winegrowing regions such as my own, to do at least a small percentage of your wine purchasing at the most extreme alternative end of the scale to those supermarkets. To meet a winemaker, to glimpse their enthusiasm, to be introduced to their products, to taste and to select, and perhaps, if so taken, to buy.

Well I live in that make-believe dream world. Mark Haisma is an unusual and gently inspirational winemaker: a genial Australian who has made his home in Burgundy, where he makes as much wine as he can from whatever grapes he can find and afford, and also a tiny bit of syrah in the northern Rhône. And every year he brings all his wine, and a few made by other people he likes, opens them up and asks anyone who’s interested to come along. If you like, you can buy some, and a few months later Mark himself (sometimes) will pop round in a van and drop them off. It’s a bit like going to visit him in Burgundy, only without the views or the fresh air or the driving.

Much wine from Burgundy is crazy expensive, and even buying direct from a cheerful Australian doesn’t make it exactly cheap: a few bottles of Mark’s top wine, the Bonnes Mares, will eventually be found in retail establishments for around £140 apiece. Fortunately his bottom wine, a humble Bourgogne Rouge, is a little more affordable – £14 when you buy it from him direct – and in 2012 he made a very delicious one indeed. Sure, I feel a bit of a fraud for turning up, tasting all his best wines and then only buying the cheapest one, but he seems happy enough about it, and it certainly works for me. His Morey St-Denis “Les Chaffots” is my favourite wine of the day, but at £39.50 a bottle it’s one for a genuinely make-believe dream world.

Everyone’s talking about Burgundy prices at the moment, as a two-week-long festival of major en primeur tastings in London comes to an end. Big-time Burg buyers are in a state of high dudgeon, because they keep rocketing upwards (the prices, not the buyers themselves). The problem is that the last few vintages have all been troublesome, leading to less wine being made and forcing producers to raise prices to cover their fixed costs. Meanwhile more and more people want to drink the stuff, leading producers and retailers to raise prices even more than they would anyway have had to. Most drinkers will never care or even hear about spikes in en primeur pricing, and my only real worry is that the high-quality, good-value wines of the Rhône will start to get silly next, but this year I have suffered myself: Mark’s Bourgogne Rouge has gone up by £2 a bottle since I last bought some, a couple of years ago. But for all the fury and the fights over £500-a-bottle allocation-only scraps from Rousseau, De Vogüé and the like, there is still value in Burgundy: I opened a bottle of Mark’s 2010 Bourgogne Rouge over the weekend, purely for research purposes you understand, and it was in sparkling, sensuous form, as good a bottle of pinot noir as £12 could ever get you.

There are other ways to meet winemakers in London – some small shops host tastings, and there are frequent trade events for those who work in the world of wine, or can sneak in on the pretext of occasionally writing an amateurish blog. I’d recommend taking as many of these chances as you can, but what sets Mark’s little event apart is that everyone is welcome – there are no tickets or guest lists or entry requirements – and nobody is expected to buy. Indeed, on the day you’re actively discouraged from buying: Mark is far too busy pouring and chatting to take orders.

I just wonder how many other small-scale winemakers could sell their wines like this, direct to the consumer. By cutting out importers and retailers the customers could pay less and the producers could still make more, all while building relationships and loyalty with the drinkers who turn up. The advantages seem so overwhelming it’s a surprise more of them don’t try it: every winemaker knows the benefits of running a cellar door, offering tastings and selling direct to people who turn up at your winery, but if those people can’t or won’t come to you, there’s no reason why you can’t go to them.

Red wine of the year: Mullineux Schist Syrah

This is just amazing. The great thing about South Africa – and clearly there are many great things about South Africa so I’ve pretty much saddled myself with a sentence that won’t really stand up to any kind of scrutiny, and it’s the second sentence of the post so it’s not a good start, but I’ll press on – is that many of the wonderful wines that are currently redefining its international standing are made using the fruit of old vines that were being ignored until a couple of years ago. They have, in other words, found that when it comes to wine at least their future and their past are the same, which is pleasing, and that the ugly and unpopular turn out to have the best character, which is too. Mullineux make three levels of wine, a basic range under the Kloof Street label that I haven’t tried but seems universally well received, a Mullineux syrah and a white blend which are both excellent, and available at around £15-£20 a bottle. This year they added a couple of top Syrahs, Schist and Granit, named after the soil from which the grapes grow, and incredibly splendid they were too. Sadly they had a price tag to match, but if I was the kind of guy who spends £60 on a bottle of wine, I’d spend it on this.

Red wine I could actually afford to buy (and did) of the year: Jamet Côtes du Rhone 2011
The only way to get your mitts on this, at least without leaving British shores, is by snaffling a case en primeur from Bibendum, at which point it is both freely available and splendidly affordable, although you do need to buy 12 bottles at once which hurts the wallet a little. Jamet is one of the great names of Côte-Rotie, which itself is one of the great names of the northern Rhone. One of the pleasures of the Rhone, though, is how common it is for top winemakers to produce, in addition to the expensive stuff, something that gives less fat-walleted winelovers a taste of their style. I’ve tried quite a few of these wines now, and enjoyed several, but this is the best of them all, a blast of fresh Syrah fruit without the excessive oak that brings down some of its rivals. The case cost me £110, plus some tax a while later, or in the region of £13 a bottle by the time I got it home. Which, for a wine of quality and individuality and scarcity, with the added bonus of a great name on the label, is a wonderful bargain. His grown-up Cote-Rotie, incidentally, normally costs £60 a bottle or more, but the 2008 is currently available for £25 (use code DRINKS21) at, um, drinks21.com, a discovery which cost me £50.

White wine of the year: Clos Joliette, Jurançon Sec 1971
If you’ve not heard of this wine, it’s because you’ve never seen it and never will. It is, I’m told, a legend of French wine, but so little makes it out of the country, and for that matter so little makes it anywhere – they only release wines when they are considered ready, and haven’t released any wine at all for nearly 20 years. In the circumstances it would be a little mean for me to go on too much about how great this is, in a wonderfully distinctive way, but great is what it is. I was told, when I drank it, all sorts of things about the vineyard, but I was too busy having a nice lunch to take notes and Google has let me down in the most disappointing way, but in brief, if you see this, and you can try it without breaking the law to do so, do it.

White wine I could actually afford to buy (and did) of the year: The Liberator This Bird has Flown 2009

There are some great white wines coming out of South Africa, one of which, Alheit’s Cartology 2011, came within a whisker of being my favourite white of the year, but I must doff my cap to the Liberator, who make one-off parcels of wine in South Africa, stick it in appealing bottles and sell it at decent prices. I’ve tried a few of their wines now, and have wavered between impressed and extremely impressed, and this Swartland white blend was definitely one of the latter, particularly since it comes with an accompanying cartoon on their website. It cost £11.95 from the Wine Society, and while now sold out they do have a couple of other Liberator wines in stock – I’d encourage you to check them out.

The Next Picpoul de Pinet award for obscure wine and/or region ready for the big time: Limoux. A great source of bargain fizz and with an apparently rapidly-expanding offering of excellent still whites, based on chardonnay, to boot. Majestic has one currently on “special” at £12.99, if you’re interested, and I’ve heard good things about one that Aldi are selling for £6.99. And it’s just an hour and a half’s drive from Pinet, if winemakers from the two regions should ever want to get together and chat about making the world happy with the gift of good cheap white wine.

Not-wine-related thing of the year: London’s libraries. Not only can you get books for free, read them and then take them back again, which while clearly brilliant is the kind of thing libraries have been doing for a while now, they also give you ebooks and audiobooks and free magazine subscriptions and access to newspaper archives. They basically do everything short of coming round to read the books to you personally while they buff your shoes. (Helpful hint: if you live in London, or visit it occasionally, it’s worth getting yourself a Westminster library card as their freebies are the best.) It is, though, still absolutely impossible to get excited about libraries without feeling definitively unhip.

Music of the year: A very fine year for music, I think. My favourite album was Matthew E White’s Big Inner, released way back in January, which includes my all-time favourite 10-minute-long song about how great Jesus is, which isn’t a subject I ever thought I’d be keen on. Best concerts included the lovely Laura Mvula playing her first ever headline show at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle, the phenomenally exciting SOHN and Nick Mulvey, who’s so good I saw him twice and am taking Mrs CF on a third outing in the new year, and whose version of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love is an act of virtuoso finger-pickin’ genius.

“The theory proposed in these pages might seem, to any rational mind, to have emanated from an imagination heightened by an abuse of Bacchic libations,” writes Dr E Maury, in his epic work of bonkers medicine Your Good Health!. And he’s not wrong.

Fully 21 years after its publication in English – Dr Maury is, as his prescriptions make pretty clear, French – I received an email from a marketing person at the publishers, Souvenir Press, asking if I’d like to read it. This is unusual enough in itself. Marketing people tend to lose interest in something within six months of its coming into existence, and here was someone still plugging away half a working lifetime later. As it happened, I did want to read it. This, after all, is a book that promises to reveal “the medical benefits of wine drinking”, and that is something that my conscience could really do with knowing all about.

Happily, one of the book’s first conclusions is that a person who weighs 11 stone, eats a balanced diet and exercises moderately can safely consume a litre of light wine – around 10% alcohol – every day. “But normally, in view of the sedentary life most of us lead nowadays, wisdom dictates that we should limit ourselves to three quarters of a litre of wine at 11% strength,” he writes. “For women, the optimum amount should not exceed half a litre.” I’m a fair bit heavier than 11 stone, and go to the gym several times a week, so even though real wine normally weighs in at between 12% and 14%, in my case a full bottle per day should be absolutely fine. A doctor says so. I have read the relevant passage to my wife.

In Mauryworld, drinking wine with food is not just acceptable, but basically mandatory. “A meal washed down with tap water is an unfortunate error in taste and a grave dietary error” which can not only cause indigestion but also has a “negative influence at a psychological level which may encourage a tendency to pessimism and introspection”. Add to that the fact – and I use the word “fact” in the loosest possible sense – that modern urban living, which “forces most people to eat out at least once a day … most often in a hurry, amid jostling crowds … swallowing at record speed foods pre-cooked in the bowels of vast industrial kitchens … affects the balance of the autonomic nervous system and leads to a condition of stress”. A sandwich and a couple of glasses of water once sounded like a perfectly normal and probably reasonably healthy lunch. Now I know it’s a recipe for a life of stress, pessimism, nervousness and introspection, I’ll be sure to sit down each day to a proper luncheon with a couple of glasses of wine and a sneer in the direction of the unenlightened stressballs scurrying nervously past on their way to Pret a Manger.

So now we know wine is healthy in a general sense, we need a few specifics. So let’s take the wines of the Medoc, which seem to be the most medically efficacious of all. They’re great for curing diarrhoea, thanks to their generous tannins which “tone up the smooth intestinal muscles and help to restore the rhythm of contractions” (sweet Vouvray is the drink of choice for the constipated – “a quarter of a bottle per meal is an effective and reasonable dose”). The Medoc’s wines also have a healthy dose of phosphates and iron, which promote the elasticity of your stomach muscles (though not as much as Champagne, No2 on the Maurylist of all-time most healthy wines – “the expulsion of gases through the mouth bear witness to this”). Other good reasons to stock your cellar with Bordeaux: it “supplies patients with vitamins”, “plays some part in purging the blood of cholesterol” and “slows down the production of histamine”, plus it’s also handy when you’re suffering from a virus, because of the ferrous oxide and organic phosphorous, and the “oenotannins which give it antibiotic properties”. So when you’ve got a virus, or if someone you know has one, or if you’re worried about catching one, half a bottle per day of a decent Bordeaux – or a Beaujolais, apparently – is mandatory.

If I had a criticism, it would be that Maury has a tendency to use as evidence convenient quotes from people who wrote in the 17^th century or earlier – the opinions of Pliny the Elder, say, or St Paul, whose medical knowledge probably doesn’t stand up to the most rigorous of modern examinations. And the language can be a little bewildering, suggesting it was written a lot more than 21 years ago. Take this, for example: “In countries where oenology has an honoured place, people would not dream of eating a meal, however modest, without the accompaniment of one or more glasses of the potion that is sacred to Bacchus.” You what?

And if I’m being really picky, I’d probably pick up on the fact that Maury is “a homeopathic doctor” which – and I don’t want to traduce any honourable homeopathic physicians here, and there may be some – is a phrase that my brain immediately translates as “the kind of doctor who makes stuff up”. Britain’s chief medical officer, and the 2010 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, are united in considering homeopathy to be “scientifically implausible”. Well stuff them, I’m going to force myself to plause it. This is my kind of science. Now where’s the corkscrew? I’ve hardly had a glass all day, and it’s nearly lunchtime. Lives are at stake here.

You can buy the book second hand via Amazon here.